Nehlsen Notebook

Broken Links mean Business

By Mary Kellenberger - Account Executive  2.18.10

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If you don’t venture out much beyond Facebook and YouTube, you may not encounter the problem of broken links. However, broken and misdirected links are still an issue for many organizations and their web sites, even in this tech-savvy world today.

To the customer, nothing can be more frustrating than clicking on the Contact Us page of a web site, or the Check Out icon, only to see a “this page cannot be displayed” error message. Maybe you have encountered other similar error messages such as “page not found” or “forbidden.”

To the business or organization, this will almost always lead to customer service calls, irate patrons and possibly lost business. Indirectly, this may even hurt your search engine optimization as web site success is often measured by time spent on a site. A customer feverously clicking buttons and repeatedly using the forward/backward navigation to find what happened to the last item in their shopping cart is not an effective use of their time.

An immediate band-aid fix for the symptom would be to ensure your Contact Us link is working properly. Above all else, the customer (or potential customer) needs a way to contact you. Should your web site not fulfill their demands, they will hopefully try to reach you another way. Although not practiced by some large companies, listing a contact email AND phone number is critical for small and mid-size companies. Providing a phone number may require someone on staff to “man the phones,” so look for ways to measure the return on investment.

Now to address the problem itself, there are many inexpensive solutions. You can type “broken link check” or “broken link analysis” into any search engine and receive thousands of options. And of course Google has a solution, Google Web Master Tools. Not to make Google’s solution sound overvalued, we actually use this tool for all our hosted sites.

Yet one of the simplest solutions which can build employee trust and morale is to ask your employees to browse, shop or even try to crack the company web site. Showing them you value their opinion can speak volumes. Once or twice a month, have someone check the web site. You can try to target the employee who would be your ideal user; however, it doesn’t hurt to vary those who test the site: tech-savvy vs. internet-newbie, Gen X vs. Gen Y, etc.

Comments will surely follow this five minute task so listen to what they have to say. If they cannot get around your site easily or find what they want in a short period of time – you may consider making changes to your site. Still not sure if you want to try this? I’ve seen companies so interested in employee feedback they offer gifts and prizes to those who find errors, broken links, misspellings and new great ideas for the company site.

Is your Contact Us page working? Did you go out and click it … or just say yes by default? Let us know what you find on your web site or samples of others.

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Lee Brinckley
Posts: 3
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Reply to toaster
Reply #2 on : Mon March 01, 2010, 08:31:36
You bring up a good point. We cannot assume that technology is perfect. After I add a location to a client's site, I ask them to verify that the location "mapped" is correct and I would say it is wrong about 50% of the time which then I work with them to correct. Online details are very important!
toaster
Posts: 3
Comment
Contact Us Page
Reply #1 on : Fri February 19, 2010, 15:08:23
The article has much relevance today, even for mid-size companies. You'd be surprised at what is overlooked. My previous company, after spending nearly 12 months developing a new web site (which was quite awesome) didn't proof the contact us page. I started browsing myself after 4 or 5 days of it going live and found one of the main office locations on the Contact Us page was "mapped" in the middle of the ocean, just off the west coast of Africa. Oops!

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